Audience members rose to their feet with impassioned shouts of “Hallelujah!” and “Amen!” at Virginia Union University’s Founders Day Convocation last Friday.

They stood to affirm keynote speaker Bishop Rudolph W. McKissick Jr.’s stirring remarks in which he praised the university for educating African-American students, including himself, against formidable obstacles since its founding 151 years ago at the site of the former slave-holding pen known as Lumpkin’s Jail in Shockoe Bottom.

Bishop McKissick earned a master’s of divinity degree from Virginia Union University’s School of Theology, now known as the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology. Today, he is senior pastor of the 14,000-member Bethel Baptist Institutional Church in Jacksonville, Fla.

He said the university has served as a “hiding place” for him and countless other students while they were educated and learned life skills that helped pave the way for their success.

“In 1865, in a place called Lumpkin’s Jail, Virginia Union began a hiding process in a culture that said we were nothing because of the color of our skin, in a culture that wanted to say we were second class citizens,” Bishop McKissick said, his voice rising.

“They began a hiding process, a process that refused to allow a society with its labels to limit the potential of young men and young women, a process that was determined to keep us until you could groom us, a process that said we will liberate your mind so that you can learn how to live a liberated life,” he added.

“And I’m thankful today that, at age 50, I think like I think and I walk like I walk and I act like I act because I got to a place that hid me and nurtured me and tried to make me who God created me to be,” he continued.

Bishop McKissick called it “the honor of my life” to return to speak at VUU.

He drew his remarks from the biblical passage in Hebrews chapter 11, verse 23 that reads: “By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.”

He spoke of how Moses’ mother, Jochebed, hid her son from Pharaoh after he ordered all newborn Hebrew boys to be killed in order to reduce the population of the enslaved Israelites.

And “why else did she hide him?” the bishop asked the audience.

“You hide what you value,” he said. “She hid him because she saw that he was someone beautiful who would be living in an oppressed condition.”

Because she hid him, Bishop McKissick added, “she was able to give birth to the one who would challenge and change the culture” of the “Egyptians’ oppressive system of slavery, which set (the Hebrews) up to be failures and second class citizens.”

He asserted that VUU has served the same role of incubating the oppressed out of harm’s way. He said the oppressors knew that “as the oppressed people increased in number, they would increase in strength” and would challenge the “cultural norms and low expectations” that society had set for them.

“Among all of us here,” he said, “somebody today ought to be glad that when you walked through these halls, that even though some might have tried to suck your life from you and society tried to hold you down, there was a Jochebed that hid you until you were ready to be released.”

With Mayor Dwight C. Jones, a VUU alumnus in the audience, Bishop McKissick said, “They were hiding us while we produced mayors and former governors. They were hiding us while we produced educators, doctors and musicians. And they were hiding us while we produced prophets.

“And the role of the prophet,” he added, “is to tell Pharaoh to let my people go free, whether Pharaoh is Obama, Clinton, Sanders, Cruz or anybody else.”

Bishop McKissick noted the highly publicized incidents of police brutality against African-Americans in the United States and labeled it “government-sanctioned murder, where sons (Trayvon Martin) could be murdered for carrying Skittles and the murderer gets off, government-sanctioned murder where police officers abuse their position and kill those who can’t breathe (Eric Garner) and shoot those whose hands are up (Michael Brown Jr.) and get off without even a slap on the wrist.

“And there’s government-sanctioned murder,” he continued, “where gun laws aren’t put in place to keep guns out of the hood for gangs to kill each other with, government sanctioned when an ex-offender can’t get a job after paying for the crimes of their past so we shoot their potential for their future.

“But I like this mother,” Bishop McKissick said of Jochebed, “because she refused to give in to the system of oppression that was set up to make her son fail. She made a choice to protect him from what was trying to kill him. She made a choice to protect him from what was trying to foreclose on his future. She made a choice to hide him from what was trying to define him as deficient. And she made the choice that his life was made for more than second class citizenship.”

He concluded by saying everyone should turn to Jesus because, “He’ll hide you from trouble, he’ll hide you from racism, he’ll hide you from sexism and he’ll hide you from oppression.

“He’ll set my foot on solid ground, and I shall not be moved,” he said.

In introductory remarks, Virginia Union President Claude G. Perkins noted that “miracles” such as Virginia Union are made possible “when people step off the banks of the water and into it.”

He said, “No one knew this place would survive these 151 years.”

“We’ve been challenged sometimes,” he added, and “we’re still standing and still getting stronger every day.

“We will continue to trouble the waters,” he promised. “I thank God for bringing us this far.”

The Virginia Union University Concert Choir, under the direction of Willis Barnett, also performed several gospel songs to the delight of the audience.